BTS: The Brutalist

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Cinematographer Lol Crawley finds the monumental visual language to capture an artform that is essentially static.

The American Dream is subverted in The Brutalist which starts with a shot of the Statue of Liberty upside down. It marks the arrival by boat of the film’s fictional protagonist, László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor, emigrating to begin a new life only to find the trauma of war amplified in the land of the free.

“The opening scene in many ways encapsulates the entire movie,” says Lol Crawley BSC who operated handheld camera throughout the film. “We start with a space that is dark, cramped and distressing for László as if still confined in a concentration camp cell and by the end of the scene he’s in the light and almost joyous, liberated and celebratory.”

Writer-director Brady Corbet has made two previous features, both historical movies: The Childhood of a Leader (2015), the story of a young American in France who grows up to be a fascist dictator, was set between 1918 and 1940; his follow-up, Vox Lux (2018), took place between 1999 and 2017, tracking the rise of a female American pop star against a backdrop of gun violence and the 9/11 terror attacks.

The British DoP photographed them both. “Brady always plans audacious shots. He’s very clear about how a scene should be covered but we don't have a lot of coverage even when we're not doing lengthy shots.”

The Brutalist spans the 1940s to 1980 and was shot on celluloid despite being made on a budget of less than $10m. László is played by Adrien Brody, his wife Erzsébet, trapped in Eastern Europe with their niece, by Felicity Jones and Harrison Lee Van Buren, an American industrialist, by Guy Pearce.

“The opening is an example of wanting to be very intimate and disorientated with László in order to later juxtapose that with a sort of formalism we encounter with the Van Burens,” Crawley explains. “Brady wanted this sense that we're in the bowels of a ship. We're introduced to László lying down and we follow him descending steps and encountering other people crossing the frame. We dip in and out of light and then there’s the idea of ascendance in which we get a sense of a different colour and of daylight ahead of us. I love the moment where Adrien leans into a porthole and the light overexposes his face, but the audience doesn't yet know where he is. Then we're spat out onto the deck of the ship.”

It was filmed as one single take but the final shot has been edited a little, including flipping some frames around to further disorientate the viewer. “Brady and editor David Jancso went with this idea of upsetting terra firma – the solidity and independence and freedom that America represents.”

It may be coincidental that László’s character is Hungarian but the production shot almost entirely in and around Budapest. This is partly because Budapest is an industrial city in the way Philadelphia used to be (the ship they shot on was moored in the Danube) but mainly because Hungary still has working film labs and technicians capable of processing the large format VistaVision negative.

“Brady wanted to use a camera system from the 1950s which seems to make perfect sense, but what then liberates it from being a sort of an affectation or gimmick are the two primary benefits of shooting on VistaVision,” explains Crawley. “One is that you have a higher resolution image [than 35mm] and the second clue is in the title. It is able to capture incredible landscapes.”

VistaVision is a 35mm format that passes through the camera horizontally rather than vertically to effectively double the image area and allow for greater image detail and clarity than traditional 35mm. It was famously employed by Alfred Hitchcock on classics including North by Northwest and Vertigo but had become mostly obsolete in the 1960s, as CinemaScope and 70mm rose to prominence as widescreen formats. The last American production to film entirely in VistaVision was Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks in 1961 while continuing to be used for special-effects sequences in everything from the original Star Wars movies to Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things in 2023.

Indeed, Crawley first worked with VistaVision while loading VFX plates for Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace in 1999.

“Because you have a bigger neg area your focal length never changes but your field of view does,” he explains. “That means when you're shooting architecture or wide spaces you're can be more faithful to how the human eye perceives it. You can be on a 50mm lens and still see from the cement to the sky. If it was another format, you'd be forced onto a wider angle lens which would cause some distortion in the image.”

Architecture is a theme to The Brutalist which refers to the movement of minimalist post-war designs which emphasised structural elements over decoration. In the film, László is commissioned to construct a public institute for Van Buren in memorial of his mother and he does so using cement.

“What's interesting is that half of the Institute is subterranean where light has difficulty penetrating but the upper half features twin towers that capture sunlight in a very particular way,” Crawley says. “László’s description of how the light is going to fall in this space remains incredibly moving to me.”

Brutalism is also a style of architecture that was predominantly created by immigrants. In scope and scale, Brutalist buildings are begging to be seen — but the people who designed or built them were fighting for their right to exist.

“László’s driving force is to create something in architecture that will be informed by his love of his family and his wife, but also his experience of the camp,” Crawley says. “He wants it to stands the test of time. At the very end of the movie, you find out that a lot of the spaces within the Institute are precise to the structures in which he suffered in Dachau.”

The DoP says his initial discussions with Corbet were about how to use a motion picture art form to capturing an art form that is essentially static. “We needed to find a visual language that could capture the monumental quality of moving through the spaces which László designs for the Institute.”

When László and Van Buren go to Italy to source marble for the altar that will be the centrepiece of the Institute, Crawley captures the beauty of the location at Carrara in Northern Tuscany. It’s the quarry where Michelangelo went to source raw material.

“The way they pour water on the marble so that you can see the veins [of the rock] in order to select the piece you want, is a wonderful ritual,” he says. “What's extraordinary is that it provides the setting for the most brutal act in the movie when Van Buren physical assaults László. Yet the landscape itself here has been physically assaulted by humans. The quarry has been mined over centuries. It reminded me of a Sebastião Salgado photo of South American open mines where hundreds of people are toiling for a pittance each day. It is inspiring and horrific at the same time.”

Driving into the site entailed going through a tunnel. “It’s like a kind of hell, going into the Earth. We thought we have to shoot this, so we quickly rigged a camera in the car and drove. It was very rudimentary. An audience might assume that everything is intended and that we had complete control but the things that are mistakes or the things that didn't come off in the way that you intend are sometimes the ones that work.”

They had two days to shoot but as soon as they turned up, fog had rolled in clouding all of the surrounding landscape. “At first, we were gutted. Now I watch it and it has to be this way. There's this beautiful dreamlike quality to it.”

An impromptu party on the site of the quarry and filmed by Corbet and Crawley as a kind of Fellini-esque handheld sequence was shot in Hungary where location manager Judy Becker had found a catacomb.

“Brady and I share a certain aesthetic,” he adds. “The films we’ve shot are like an unofficial trilogy touching on the contrast between antiquity and modernity. We like to work in low light. We like to underexpose the film. We like to push process it.  

“I realized early on in my career that sometimes your job as a DP is not about imposing. It's about recognising how not to screw something up. It’s about protecting the space because there’s a reason that you chose that space to film in the first place. So, I don't tend to use a lot of hard light hard sources. The lighting is quite soft and naturalistic. It’s really trying to light the space and give the actors the room. I don't shoot every film that way but it certainly felt like very important for this.”

“So, I'll be shown a space by Brady or Judy, such as the catacomb where that Fellini-esque dance happens, and it’s almost like casting a location. My challenge is to film that location and to keep consistency of light for the duration of the scene. I'll study the location in terms of the light and how the light is moving try not to change anything intrinsic about it.”

Crawley was aided by Hungarian Steadicam operator Attila Pfeffer who shot one of the film’s final sequences as a single long take, when Erzsébet confronts van Buren at his house during dinner.

“For a start he put the VistaVision camera on a Steadicam, which I'm not sure anyone has done before. This shot starts out Steadicam then turns into a handheld and then becomes Steadicam again because Brady wanted the camera to wobble at a particularly distressing moment for Erzsébet. Attila did this amazing thing I've never seen anyone do where he essentially took the whole Steadicam rig and handheld it before resuming smooth Steadicam mode.”

Brutal sound

For the score, Corbet turned to British experimental musician Daniel Blumberg, who has recorded three albums for Mute Records with the producer Peter Walsh, who helped create many of Scott Walker’s solo albums. Walker, the composer of Corbet’s previous two films, passed away while The Brutalist was in pre-production. The film is dedicated to him

Adds Corbet: “In the same way architecture uses slabs of concrete, Daniel and I wanted slabs of sound for the score — bars that become resounding and intoxicating, but in a measured, minimalist fashion.”

The Institute only reaches completion in the last 25 minutes of a 215-minute movie, so the soundtrack, and even the filmmaking itself needed to reflect the Brutalist method.

“We linger up close on spaces and characters, so when we finally crack wide open in Carrara, and on the construction site as the Institute takes shape, it’s what you’ve thirsted for all along — the psychological effect of finally being able to breathe.”

Blumberg asked pianist John Tilbury to create improv-style piano score that was linked to László’s interior life. For the film’s epilogue set at the Venice Biennale in 1980, Blumberg collaborated with synth-pop star Vince Clarke.